Editing Deconstruction (section)

==Influences==
Derrida's theories on deconstruction were themselves influenced by the work of linguists such as Ferdinand de Saussure (whose writings on [[semiotics]] also became a cornerstone of [[structuralism]] in the mid-20th century) and literary theorists such as [[Roland Barthes]] (whose works were an investigation of the logical ends of structuralist thought). Derrida's views on deconstruction stood in opposition to the theories of structuralists such as [[Psychoanalytic theory|psychoanalytic theorist]] [[Jacques Lacan]], and anthropologist [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]]. However, Derrida [[#Not post-structuralist|resisted attempts]] to label his work as "[[Post-structuralism|post-structuralist]]".<!--See below for the whole paragraph which has its own references{{Citation needed|reason=Correct but this entire paragraph needs references.|date=December 2013}}-->

===Influence of Nietzsche===
[[File:Nietzsche187a.jpg|thumb|Friedrich Nietzsche]]
Derrida's motivation for developing deconstructive criticism, suggesting the fluidity of language over static forms, was largely inspired by [[Friedrich Nietzsche]]'s philosophy, beginning with his interpretation of [[Trophonius]]. In ''Daybreak'', Nietzsche announces that "All things that live long are gradually so saturated with reason that their origin in unreason thereby becomes improbable. Does not almost every precise history of an origination impress our feelings as paradoxical and wantonly offensive? Does the good historian not, at bottom, constantly contradict?".<ref>{{cite book|title=Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality|last1=Nietzsche|first1=Friedrich|last2=Clark|first2=Maudemarie|last3=Leiter|first3=Brian|last4=Hollingdale|first4=R.J.|date=1997|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0521599634|location=Cambridge, U.K.|pages=8–9}}</ref>

Nietzsche's point in ''Daybreak'' is that standing at the end of modern history, modern thinkers know too much to continue to be deceived by an illusory grasp of satisfactorily complete reason. Mere proposals of heightened reasoning, logic, philosophizing and science are no longer solely sufficient as the royal roads to truth. Nietzsche disregards Platonism to revisualize the history of the West as the self-perpetuating history of a series of political moves, that is, a manifestation of the [[will to power]], that at bottom have no greater or lesser claim to truth in any noumenal (absolute) sense. By calling attention to the fact that he has assumed the role of a subterranean Trophonius, in dialectical opposition to Plato, Nietzsche hopes to sensitize readers to the political and cultural context, and the political influences that impact authorship.

Where Nietzsche did not achieve deconstruction, as Derrida sees it, is that he missed the opportunity to further explore the will to power as more than a manifestation of the sociopolitically effective operation of writing that Plato characterized, stepping beyond Nietzsche's penultimate revaluation of all Western values, to the ultimate, which is the emphasis on "the role of writing in the production of knowledge".<ref name="Zuckert"/>

===Influence of Saussure===
Derrida approaches all texts as constructed around elemental oppositions which all [[discourse]] has to articulate if it intends to make any sense whatsoever. This is so because identity is viewed in [[Non-essentialism|non-essentialist]] terms as a construct, and because constructs only produce meaning through the interplay of [[difference (philosophy)|difference]] inside a "system of distinct signs". This approach to text is influenced by the [[semiology]] of [[Ferdinand de Saussure]].<ref>{{cite book|last1=Royle|first1=Nick|title=Jacques Derrida|date=2003|publisher=Routledge|location=London|isbn=9780415229319|pages=6–623|edition=Reprint|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nNaSdb9VMTwC&pg=PA62|access-date=8 September 2017|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Derrida|first1=Jacques|last2=Ferraris|first2=Maurizio|title=A Taste for the Secret|date=2001|publisher=Wiley|isbn=9780745623344|page=76|quote=I take great interest in questions of language and rhetoric, and I think they deserve enormous consideration; but there is a point where the authority of final jurisdiction is neither rhetorical nor linguistic, nor even discursive. The notion of trace or of text is introduced to mark the limits of the linguistic turn. This is one more reason why I prefer to speak of 'mark' rather than of language. In the first place the mark is not anthropological; it is prelinguistic; it is the possibility of language, and it is every where there is a relation to another thing or relation to an other. For such relations, the mark has no need of language.}}</ref>

Saussure is considered one of the fathers of [[structuralism]] when he explained that terms get their meaning in reciprocal determination with other terms inside language:

<blockquote>In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier, language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system. The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less importance than the other signs that surround it. [...] A linguistic system is a series of differences of sound combined with a series of differences of ideas; but the pairing of a certain number of acoustical signs with as many cuts made from the mass thought engenders a system of values.<ref name="Saussure"/></blockquote>

Saussure explicitly suggested that linguistics was only a branch of a more general semiology, a science of signs in general, human codes being only one part. Nevertheless, in the end, as Derrida pointed out, Saussure made linguistics "the regulatory model", and "for essential, and essentially metaphysical, reasons had to privilege speech, and everything that links the sign to phone".<ref name="Derrida2"/>{{rp|21, 46, 101, 156, 164}} Derrida will prefer to follow the more "fruitful paths (formalization)" of a general semiotics without falling into what he considered "a hierarchizing teleology" privileging linguistics, and to speak of "mark" rather than of language, not as something restricted to mankind, but as prelinguistic, as the pure possibility of language, working everywhere there is a relation to something else.{{citation needed|date=August 2021}}